Strong Lessonsfor
Engaged Buddhists

Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you,
and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejectyou,
and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with
contempt, or dispute the passage with you?

 Whitman, Stronger Lessons

In the middle of the Vietnam war Thich Nhat Hanh and a few other Buddhist monks, nuns and
laypeople broke with the 2500-year tradition of Buddhist apoliticism and founded the Tiep
Hien Order in an effort to relate Buddhist ethical and meditational practice to
contemporary social issues. Members of the order organized antiwar demonstrations,
underground support for draft resisters, and various relief and social service projects.
Though the movement was soon crushed in Vietnam, Nhat Hanh has carried on similar
activities from exile in France, and the idea of socially engaged Buddhism has
spread among Buddhists around the world. One of its main expressions in the West, the
Buddhist Peace Fellowship, defines its purpose as being to bring a Buddhist
perspective to contemporary peace, environmental, and social action movements and
to raise peace, environmental, feminist, and social justice concerns among Western
Buddhists.

The emergence of engaged Buddhism is a healthy development. Despite the bullshit that
Buddhism shares with all religions (superstition, hierarchy, male chauvinism, complicity
with the established order), it has always had a core of genuine insight based on the
practice of meditation. It is this vital core, along with its freedom from the enforced
dogmas characteristic of Western religions, that has enabled it to catch on so readily
even among the most sophisticated milieus in other cultures. People engaged in movements
for social change might well benefit from the mindfulness, equanimity and self-discipline
fostered by Buddhist practice; and apolitical Buddhists could certainly stand to be
confronted with social concerns.

So far, however, the engaged Buddhists social awareness has remained extremely
limited. If they have begun to recognize certain glaring social realities, they show
little understanding of their causes or possible solutions. For some, social engagement
simply means doing some sort of volunteer charitable work. Others, taking their cue
perhaps from Nhat Hanh remarks on arms production or Third World starvation, resolve
not to eat meat or not to patronize or work for companies that produce weapons. Such
gestures may be personally meaningful to them, but their actual effect on global crises is
negligible. If millions of Third World people are allowed to starve, this is not because
there is not enough food to go around, but because there are no profits to be made by
feeding penniless people. As long as there is big money to be made by producing weapons or
ravaging the environment, someone will do it, regardless of moral appeals to people
good will; if a few conscientious persons refuse, a multitude of others will scramble for
the opportunity to do it in their place.

Others, sensing that such individual gestures are not enough, have ventured into more
political activities. But in so doing they have generally just followed along
with the existing peace, ecological and other so-called progressive groups, whose tactics
and perspectives are themselves quite limited. With very few exceptions these groups take
the present social system for granted and simply jockey within it in favor of their
particular issue, often at the expense of other issues. As the situationists put it:
Fragmentary oppositions are like the teeth on cogwheels: they mesh with each other
and make the machine go round  the machine of the spectacle, the machine of
power.1

A few of the engaged Buddhists may realize that it is
necessary to get beyond the present system; but failing to grasp its entrenched,
self-perpetuating nature, they imagine gently and gradually modifying it from within, and
then run into continual contradictions. One of the Tiep Hien Precepts says: Possess
nothing that should belong to others. Respect the property of others, but prevent others
from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings.2
How is one to prevent the exploitation of suffering if one respects the
property that embodies it? And what if the owners of such property fail to relinquish it
peacefully?

If the engaged Buddhists have failed to explicitly oppose the socioeconomic system and
have limited themselves to trying to alleviate a few of its more appalling effects, this
is for two reasons. First, they are not even clear about what it is. Since they are
allergic to any analysis that seems divisive, they can hardly hope to
understand a system based on class divisions and bitter conflicts of interest. Like almost
everyone else they have simply swallowed the official version of reality, in which the
collapse of the Stalinist state-capitalist regimes in Russia and East Europe supposedly
demonstrates the inevitability of the Western form of capitalism.

Secondly, like the peace movement in general they have adopted the notion that
violence is the one thing that must be avoided at all cost. This attitude is
not only simplistic, it is hypocritical: they themselves tacitly rely on all sorts of
state violence (armies, police, jails) to protect their loved ones and possessions, and
would certainly not passively submit to many of the conditions they reproach others for
rebelling against. In practice pacifism usually ends up being more tolerant toward
the ruling order than toward its opponents. The same organizers who reject any
participant who might spoil the purity of their nonviolent demonstrations often pride
themselves on having developed amicable understandings with police. Small wonder that
dissidents who have had somewhat different experiences with the police have not been
overly impressed with this sort of Buddhist perspective.

It is true that many forms of violent struggle, such as terrorism or minority coups,
are inconsistent with the sort of open, participatory organization required to create a
genuinely liberated global society. An antihierarchical revolution can only be carried out
by the people as a whole, not by some group supposedly acting on their behalf; and such an
overwhelming majority would have no need for violence except to neutralize any pockets of
the ruling minority that may violently try to hold on to their power. But any significant
social change inevitably involves some violence. It would seem more sensible to
admit this fact, and simply strive to minimize violence as far as possible.

This antiviolence dogmatism goes from the dubious to the ludicrous when it also opposes
any form of spiritual violence. There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying
to act without anger in your heart and trying to avoid getting caught up in
pointless hatred and revenge; but in practice this ideal often just serves as an excuse
to repress virtually any incisive analysis or critique by labeling it as
angry or intellectually arrogant. On the basis of their (correct)
impression of the bankruptcy of traditional leftism, the engaged Buddhists have
concluded that all confrontational tactics and divisive theories
are misguided and irrelevant. Since this attitude amounts to ignoring virtually the entire
history of social struggles, many richly suggestive experiences remain a closed book to
them (the anarchist experiments in social organization during the 1936 Spanish revolution,
for example, or the situationist tactics that provoked the May 1968 revolt in France), and
they are left with nothing but to share with each other the most innocuous
New-Agey platitudes and to try to drum up interest in the most tepid,
lowest-common-denominator actions.

It is ironic that people capable of appreciating the classic Zen anecdotes fail to see
that sharp wakeup tactics may also be appropriate on other terrains. Despite all the
obvious differences, there are certain interesting analogies between Zen and situationist
methods: both insist on practical realization of their insights, not just passive assent
to some doctrine; both use drastic means, including rejecting pointless dialogue and
refusing to offer ready-made positive alternatives, in order to pull the rug
out from under habitual mindsets; both are therefore predictably accused of
negativity.

One of the old Zen sayings is: If you meet a Buddha, kill him. Have the
engaged Buddhists succeeded in killing Thich Nhat Hanh in their minds? Or are
they still attached to his image, awed by his mystique, passively consuming his works and
uncritically accepting his views? Nhat Hanh may be a wonderful person; his writings may be
inspiring and illuminating in certain respects; but his social analysis is na´ve. If he
seems slightly radical this is only in contrast to the even greater political na´vetÚ of
most other Buddhists. Many of his admirers will be shocked, perhaps even angered, at the
idea that anyone could have the nerve to criticize such a saintly person, and will try to
dismiss this leaflet by pigeonholing it as some bizarre sort of angry leftist
ideology and by assuming (incorrectly) that it was written by someone with no
experience of Buddhist meditation.

Others may grant that some of these points are well taken, but will then ask: Do
you have any practical, constructive alternative, or are you just criticizing? What do you
suggest that we do? You dont need to be a master carpenter to point out that
the roof leaks. If a critique stirs even a few people to stop and think, to see through
some illusion, perhaps even provokes them to new ventures of their own, this is already a
very practical effect. How many actions accomplish as much?

As for what you should do: the most important thing is to stop relying on others to
tell you what you should do. Better make your own mistakes than follow the most
spiritually wise or politically correct leader. It is not only more interesting, it is
usually more effective, to pursue your own experiments, however small, than to be a unit
in a regiment of units. All hierarchies need to be contested, but the most liberating
effect often comes from challenging the ones in which you yourself are most implicated.

One of the May 1968 graffiti was: Be realistic, demand the impossible.
Constructive alternatives within the context of the present social order are
at best limited, temporary, ambiguous; they tend to be coopted and become part of the
problem. We may be forced to deal with certain urgent issues such as war or environmental
threats, but if we accept the systems own terms and confine ourselves to merely
reacting to each new mess produced by it, we will never overcome it. Ultimately we can
solve survival issues only by refusing to be blackmailed by them, by aggressively going
beyond them to challenge the whole anachronistic social organization of life.
Movements that limit themselves to cringing defensive protests will not even achieve the
pitiful survival goals they set for themselves.